In the May 26, 2021 video How a NY special grand jury could impact Donald Trump CNN’s senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig mentions the following in a background piece outlining the basics of a US Special Grand Jury. After about 01:17
they say:
It is a one-sided presentation; it’s only the prosecutor, the grand jurors, and a court reporter. There’s no judge, there’s no defense lawyer. So it is extremely one-sided; you hear this expression ‘the grand jury would indict a ham sandwich’ there’s some truth to that; it’s not an adversarial process like you’d have at trial.
and the origin of the 'ham sandwich' reference is mentioned in Wikipedia's Grand Juries in the United States; Rubber Stamp for the Prosecution:
[...]Grand jurors also often lack the ability and knowledge to judge sophisticated cases and complicated federal laws. This puts them at the mercy of very well trained and experienced federal prosecutors. Grand jurors often hear only the prosecutor's side of the case and are usually persuaded by them. Grand juries almost always indict people on the prosecutor's recommendation. An unnamed Rochester defense lawyer was quoted in a 1979 newspaper article claiming that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich", a saying subsequently repeated by the chief judge of New York State's highest court, Sol Wachtler. And William J. Campbell, a former federal district judge in Chicago, noted: "[T]oday, the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury." (references therein)
Question: With only prosecutor(s) and a court reporter, are jurors at all instructed to not simply "rubber stamp" the prosecution's desire to indict? Are the terms and concepts necessary for them to function as a jury (e.g. "preponderance of evidence") explained to them? If so, by who? Is there a standard "script" or talking points for such instruction?
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